Hi Guest:
Welcome to TRIBE, Toronto's largest and longest running online community. If you'd like to post here, or reply to existing posts on TRIBE, you first have to register on the forum. You can register with your facebook ID or with an email address. Join us!

Pompeo just got back from Saudi Arabia. A day or two later, the " fight " scenario emerges...2 weeks after his death.
The " fight " scenario sounds like it was hatched from Trump himself. Fucking Ludicrous.

The Saudis should be forced to allow UN Investigators along with medical coroners to examine the body. Refusal, should be met with Global Sanctions that hit them hard.
Problem with that is, you'd probably need a dozen coroners for each piece.

Saudi's are the real Animals, not the Chinese.
Trump is a spineless moron.

Erdogan wants to rebuild the Ottoman Empire, make Istanbul the capital of the Islamic world again. Saudi Arabia is also in the empire building business as well right now. So, you tell me: Friends, or competitors?

That Saudi consulate is wired like a fucking Christmas Tree - and the Saudis were never aware. I wouldn't be surprised if the Turks have a freaking Tupac performance hologram to throw in with footage they got on tape.

Saudi Arabia’s public prosecutor said today that the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate was premeditated, reversing previous official statements that the killing was unintended. The death of Mr. Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and critic of de facto Saudi ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has sparked global outrage.

The Saudi disclosure came after CIA director Gina Haspel heard an audio recording of the killing during a fact-finding visit to Turkey this week. It was the first indication Ankara has shared its key investigative evidence. She was due to brief U.S. President Donald Trump today.

Prime Minsister Justin Trudeau said today that suspending the federal permits that allow the export of a massive sale of armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia would be a way to put pressure on Riyadh to offer more details on what really happened to Mr. Khashoggi, Steven Chase writes. At the same time, he is still resisting calls to outright cancel the $15-billion sale of weaponized light armoured vehicles, a contract he has previously said carried a kill fee of $1-billion.

Ending the arms deal would be an ineffective punishment, argues David Chatterson, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “If we truly want to have an impact, advance Canada’s interests and help the Saudi people change the behaviour of their rulers, and help other oppressed people suffering under authoritarian rule, we should lead a concerted and sustained effort to support and promote a free and vibrant press worldwide, and to track, publicize and condemn attacks on the press wherever they occur.”

Attacks on food markets like this one are part of the coalition’s systematic campaign to target and destroy Yemen’s food production and distribution. The coalition has made a regular practice of targeting farms, fishing boats, and marketplaces as part of an effort to deprive an already malnourished population of food. There is no possible justification for targeting civilians as they were trying to obtain food from a local market. The slaughter of almost two dozen people is a reminder that Saudi coalition forces continue to hit civilian targets with great frequency, and civilians in and around Hodeidah are at great risk of being killed and wounded while the coalition’s attack on the port and its surroundings continues.

This latest massacre of civilians by coalition forces has been followed by news that the Hodeidah offensive is soon going to escalate:

The Saudi-led coalition has sent reinforcements to Yemen’s west coast ahead of a fresh assault on the rebel-held port city of Hodeida, Yemeni officials said Wednesday.

The city is a lifeline for international aid deliveries, and the battle to wrest it from the rebels has, like the rest of Yemen’s war, fallen into a stalemate.​

Unless the U.S. cuts off support to the coalition and halts this offensive, there will be many more attacks on civilians like the airstrike on this vegetable market. Civilian casualties keep rising, and U.S. military assistance is just helping the coalition to blow up civilian targets. Congress needs to vote for H.Con.Res. 138 and S.J.Res. 54 to put a stop to this once and for all.

Something Trump said in a recent interview perfectly captures his misguided, mercenary understanding of international relationships:

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said he wanted to believe Prince Mohammed’s denial of any foreknowledge of Mr. Khashoggi’s death.

“They’ve been a very good ally,” Mr. Trump said. “They’ve been a tremendous investor in our military equipment and other things. They buy tremendous amounts of things from our country [bold mine-DL].…So I certainly want to believe him.”​

Saudi Arabia isn’t really an ally at all, and it is all but impossible to grant that they have been a “very good” one in recent years. Saudi Arabia’s destabilizing and reckless behavior doesn’t concern Trump, and he isn’t judging them by their international behavior in any case. Trump’s attitude towards an “allied” government depends almost entirely on whether or not he thinks they pay us enough. If he believes that an ally is ripping the U.S. off in some way, he is extremely critical of that government and sometimes even becomes hostile to their leaders as a result. On the other hand, if he thinks that they “buy tremendous amounts of things,” he doesn’t want to say a bad word about them and doesn’t want to do anything to upset the relationship. This is consistent with his protection racket/tribute view of relations with other countries, and it shows that advancing U.S. interests never really factors into his thinking. That is why he is so protective of the (exaggerated) arms sales to the Saudis, and it’s why he has no problem subordinating U.S. interests to those of regional clients.

The Trump administration treats arms sales to client governments almost as ends in themselves, and they seem to think that the continuation of those sales justifies continued support for whatever disastrous policies the clients implement. As Hanna and Cambanis explain in their article on Yemen, this gets the relationship between U.S. interests and arms sales backwards:

The problem of weapons sales transcends the Yemen War and has contaminated a growing swathe of U.S. policy. Weapons sales have acquired a pernicious logic of their own, as if funding the U.S. weapons industry were a jobs creation program and national security policy simply a means to promote domestic economic growth. U.S. weapons sales can be a major driver of conflict and have routinely complicated foreign policy in regions where the imperative to maintain market shares conflicts with core U.S. interests. In specific cases like the Yemen War, where weapons sales run so thoroughly against U.S. policy goals, they should end conclusively.

To date, the United States has been almost entirely unwilling to give up any weapons contract, no matter how noxious, because of the adverse impact to the U.S. economy. This type of path dependency is counterproductive. The United States must be willing to forego profitable contracts that harm our interests or bind us to ineffective allies or specific misguided policies.​

In Trump’s view, a government that buys lots of weapons from the U.S. is a “very good ally” simply because it is a large purchaser of U.S.-made weapons regardless of what it does with those weapons. That helps explain why Trump is so adamantly opposed to cutting off those sales, since he sees the arms sales as the defining feature of the relationship and the thing that separates the “good allies” from the rest. He can’t imagine why the U.S. should forego arms sales profits for the sake of other interests, much less for the sake of principles, and so he sees no reason not to keep arming a government guilty of numerous war crimes.